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We might not know a lot about insects, but we all know two facts about honeybees. They are very hard-working creatures, and when they sting you, they die. Well, only the second part is true.

Now it seems very reasonable that honeybees are hard-working. After all, to make just one single kilogram of honey, honeybees have to make a total of some 10 million separate visits to flowers to collect the nectar — and in the course of these 10 million visits they cover a total distance equal to ten trips around the Earth. As a result, in the USA honey bees produce about 29 kilograms of honey in each of five million-odd hives every year.

But are they hard-working? No. It turns out that honeybees spend only about 20 per cent of the time working — and the rest of the time, they just hang around and chill out.

Mind you, the queen bee really does know what hard work is. In her life of six to nine years she produces about one egg each minute. That works out to laying her own body weight in eggs each day.

Now to understand why the honeybee has to die after she stings you, you need to realise that bees come in three 'genders' or 'sexes' or 'orientations'.

First, there is one queen who is the only fertile female in the hive. She is the only bee with ovaries.

Second, there are about 60,000 sterile female workers, that do not have ovaries. From birth to about day three, they clean the hive. By the fifth day of their life, they become nursing bees because certain glands have matured inside their mouths. By day 12, their wax-making glands are functioning, so they set to making structures in the nest and storing nectar and honey. Around the 19th day of their life they begin guarding the nest with their sting. By day 21, they are halfway through their short lives and have begun to leave the nest to forage for nectar and pollen. And then around day 42 they usually die.

Drones make up the third gender living in the hive, perhaps 1,000-or-so of them. They don't have a stinger, and they can't collect nectar. Luckily, they are fertile and can make sperm. The queen will mate once in her life with half a dozen of these drones, and then their usefulness is over.

So how come a female worker honey bee has to die when she stings you?

First, her stinger has little one-way barbs on it, so once it goes into your flesh she can't pull it out again. Second, the barb is connected to a sack full of venom, as well connected to her digestive tract, as well as some muscles and nerves. So once she has stung you, her little stinger will keep on pumping venom into your flesh, even if you scrape her body off you. Mind you, you might remove her body, but the stinger (together with part of her gut and the venom sac and all the muscles and nerves to make it work) stay behind. She dies from a case of massive abdominal rupture.

The obvious question is "for what purpose?" Who benefits, when a honeybee stings you, and then dies?

The clue is the fact that the female worker honeybee is sterile. She cannot pass on her genes or DNA to future generations — because she has no ovaries and can't make babies. The only way that she can pass her DNA on to future generations is by protecting her sisters, and that includes her big sister the queen, back in the hive. So she gives up everything for the good of the hive.

Some people say that you should pull the stinger straight out of your flesh, while other people say that you should flick it off sideways or scrape it off. It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that you get it out as soon as possible — because the nerve cells are telling the muscles to keep on squirting venom into your flesh.

So out of the 60,000 bees, it's only the queen that works hard for the honey — but don't forget that it's the workers that are prepared to take a dive for the hive...

mac :

Jeff Humphreys :

11 Apr 2013 2:49:39pm

Always immediately scrape or scratch out the sting - never pull it out. How and when you extract the string makes a big difference to the amount of venom left in your body. If you pull the sting out you also squeeze the remaining venom in the venom sac into your body. Scratching the sting out avoids this. The other important thing is the sooner you scratch the less venom will be pumped into you.

Adrian the Bee man :

16 Apr 2013 11:53:23pm

When teh queen swarms, she leaves behind a daughter queen to carry on in the hive, either as a newly hatched queen, or as a late larval queen still in her cell. As to the drones, they do not mate with the queen in the hive, but on the wing, so they are unlikely to mate with a sister queen, thereby spreading the gene pool, and they usually eave the hive to die.

Graeme Swan :

malbrown2 :

12 Apr 2013 7:20:05am

My theory as to why Bees have a barbed sting is due to other animals and not the Bee.If a Bee stings another animal it is due to some kind of threat to the Bee and/or hive. The Bee stings the animal and then gets stuck. The victim of the Bee looks at the painful site of the sting and sees a Bee stuck in their skin. They then make an association with the pain and the Bee hence learning that Bees sting and they are best left alone.

ozbail :

José :

Paul :

12 Apr 2013 11:20:48am

This is a very well written article. From my experience as a beekeeper, worker bees do lay eggs.

When a queen lays an egg that hatches into a worker bee, the egg is fertilised from stored sperm in her sperm sack. However if she lays an egg to hatch into a drone, the egg bypasses the sperm sack and isn’t fertilised.

Female worker bees aren’t sterile, just infertile as they can’t mate but do have ovaries.

What is often seen when a hive becomes queen-less for a few weeks (like a failed attempt to replace their queen for what reason - swarming, supersedure, or a queen that didn’t return from her mating flights) are worker bees that lay eggs. What hatch out are drones, the result of an unfertilised egg. In the end the colony dies as the bees can not replace their queen, a new replacement queen must first start from a fertilised egg, of which the worker bees cannot produce.

Adrian the Bee man :

16 Apr 2013 11:56:04pm

I was going to make a similar reply about workers aving ovaries, but I see it has been done. I am going to double check some resources about bees' lifespans though. Dr Karl has workers only living for six weeks, which may be true in the peak honey season, but I believe they can live two to three times as long in the off season.

perun :

15 Apr 2013 11:21:21am

Do bees die when they sting any animal ?I remember being told that was not the case when stinging insects as they were more rigid than "fleshy" animals and the stinger could be retrieved.Is this the case ?

Jay Bourke :

17 Apr 2013 6:42:08am

This author needs to do a bit more research. There are factual mistakes and inaccurate conclusions. Female worker bees do have ovaries. Their egg laying is suppressed by the queen's pheremone. If no queen is present female workers will lay unfertilized eggs which will be male drones. The queen doesn't die when she stings because she needs to use her stinger multiple times to kill rival queens when she hatches. Female workers die after stinging because the stinging organs are torn out of their abdomen. I am unaware of any evidence that this is related to their supposed infertility.

Cate :

17 Apr 2013 9:30:02am

According to Bruce White OAM (Technical Specialist Apiculture, Department of Primary Industries for 43 years) it is completely untrue that worker bees only work 20% of the time)... unless of course Dr Karl doesn't consider cleaning the hive, nursing and the activity of worker bees all through the night fanning the day's harvest to remove moisture from the flower nectar (from 70% moisture down to below 21%) as "work"?

Worker bees work literally 24 hours a day. In spring/summer their life cycle is just 6 - 8 weeks (related to the work they do maturing honey) versus when there are no nectar flowers the life of the bee is much longer (12 weeks or more) because they no longer do the night shift ripening honey and aren't as active during the shorter daylight hours.

I may not be a celebrity scientist, but here are the facts: honeybees are the hardest working insects on the planet and responsible for 1 in every 3 mouthfuls of food we eat (not to mention creators of the lovely natural sweetener that we enjoy - honey)! Worker bees literally halve their life span in spring/summer because they work themselves to death.